Dear Readers and Writers,
My good olde Farmer’s Almanac tells me that the 2026 autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere occurs on Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 5:05 PM, Pacific Daylight time. This astronomical event signifies the official first day of fall, marking the exact moment the sun crosses the celestial equator.
In autumn, our eyes get to eat ecstasy. Endless colors of leaf-life infuse our pupils: vital reds, brilliant oranges, tallowy yellow joy-leaf scenes seen whoosh down color-hungry ocular nerves and feed our brain-caves feasts of color. Please partake of this food for your spirit. Let it nourish you, bring you through to brightness right here amidst the darkness of environmental degradation, and the fascistic deceit, greed and attempted domination we must navigate together.
We’re at a cusp at this time, facing the possible death of our species and the probable, gradual death of a way of life that is no longer sustainable. We’re experiencing the labor pains of a new way and world trying to be born.
Sages of all times have felt the Life, the Divine Presence that holds both birth and death, and counseled, “Be ye of good cheer.” “Be still and know I AM.” “And all will be well.”
We too can find some measure of rest in that deep felt sense of the wholeness of Life Itself, of the great I AM (the I behind all our i-dentities) and find some degree of peace in the midst of the dying and phoenix birthing of this time we’re living into.
Out of this peace, we can act much more compassionately and effectively in the service of all on our Mother Earth, each in our own way.
May the cooling beauty of autumn help to deliver this gift of peace to you.
This letter is short on my prose reflections. Herewith follows a panoply of song-and-poem-prompts to prime your creative pump and offer you some autumnal reflections on coolness, beauty, harvest and colorful, restful death.
Take your own sweet time to read some or all of the below. You might write some lines, or might not. I want this to be refreshing and fun for you.
Here’s a song to begin this celebration, a song of beauty and death, from the multi-instrumental Scottish singer/songwriter and true modern bard, Robin Williamson…from his first album.
October Song
by Robin Williamson
I’ll sing you this October song
There is no song before it
The words and tune are none of my own
For my joys and sorrows bore it
Beside the sea, the brambly briars
In the still of evening
Birds fly out behind the sun
And with them I’ll be leaving
The fallen leaves that jewel the ground
They know the art of dying
And leave with joy their glad gold hearts
In the scarlet shadows lying
When hunger calls my footsteps home
The morning follows after
I swim the seas within my mind
And the pine trees laugh green laughter
I used to search for happiness
And I used to follow pleasure
But I found a door behind my mind
And that’s the greatest treasure
For rulers like to lay down laws
And rebels like to break them
And the poor priests like to walk in chains
And God likes to forsake them
I met a man whose name was Time
And he said I must be going
But just how long ago that was
I have no way of knowing
Sometimes I want to murder time
Sometimes when my heart’s aching
But mostly I just stroll along
The path that he is taking
Here’s one I wrote:
OZARK GOLD SCROLL
The Box Turtle
containing all winds
releases all winds.
Trees sway,
shed shoals of leaves
that sink and swim.
Gold tallow leaves,
vermilion eaves,
red caves all laid low.
The absent stand
in rusted woods
in autumn’s cider glow.
—Geoff
Autumn
1
What is sometimes called a
tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning
is only the long
red and orange branch of
a green maple
in early September reaching
into the greenest field
out of the green woods at the
edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered tired
of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer re-
minding everyone (in
our family) of a Russian
song a story
by Chekhov or my father
2
What is sometimes called a
tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning
is only the long
red and orange branch of
a green maple
in early September reaching
into the greenest field
out of the green woods at the
edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered tired
of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer re-
minding everyone (in
our family) of a Russian
song a story by
Chekhov or my father on
his own lawn standing
beside his own wood in
the United States of
America saying (in Russian)
this birch is a lovely
tree but among the others
somehow superficial
—Grace Paley, “Autumn” from Long Walks and Intimate Talks by Grace Paley and Vera B. Williams, 1991
(Nay, never superficial.)
Song for Autumn
Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
the birds that will come – six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
—Mary Oliver
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
—Stanley Kunitz, “End of Summer” from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1953
The word-flow in this next poem by John Keats is so mellow and sensuous:
To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
—John Keats
The below 2 poems are by John Clare, much beloved by me and many other poetry lovers. Here’s an entry on John Clare from the Britannica:
John Clare (born July 13, 1793, Helpston, near Peterborough, Northamptonshire, England—died May 20, 1864, Northampton, Northamptonshire) was an English peasant poet of the Romantic school.
Clare was the son of a labourer and began work on local farms at the age of seven. Though he had limited access to books, his poetic gift, which revealed itself early, was nourished by his parents’ store of folk ballads. Clare was an energetic autodidact, and his first verses were much influenced by the Scottish poet James Thomson. Early disappointment in love—for Mary Joyce, the daughter of a prosperous farmer—made a lasting impression on him.
In 1820 his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published and created a stir. Clare visited London, where he enjoyed a brief season of celebrity in fashionable circles. He made some lasting friends, among them Charles Lamb, and admirers raised an annuity for him. That same year he married Martha Turner, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, the “Patty of the Vale” of his poems. From then on he encountered increasing misfortune. His second volume of poems, The Village Minstrel (1821), attracted little attention. His third, The Shepherd’s Calendar; with Village Stories, and Other Poems (1827), though containing better poetry, met with the same fate. His annuity was not enough to support his family of seven children and his dependent father, so he supplemented his income as a field labourer and tenant farmer. Poverty and drink took their toll on his health. His last book, The Rural Muse (1835), though praised by critics, again sold poorly; the fashion for peasant poets had passed. Clare began to suffer from fears and delusions. In 1837, through the agency of his publisher, he was placed in a private asylum at High Beech, Epping, where he remained for four years. Improved in health and driven by homesickness, he escaped in July 1841. He walked the 80 miles to Northborough, penniless, eating grass by the roadside to stay his hunger. He left a moving account in prose of that journey, addressed to his imaginary wife “Mary Clare.” At the end of 1841 he was certified insane. He spent the final 23 years of his life at St. Andrew’s Asylum, Northampton, writing, with strangely unquenched lyric impulse, some of his best poetry.
I really love Adam Foulds’s 2009 historical novel about John Clare, The Quickening Maze, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It so compassionately explores the nature poet’s long years in a private asylum.
Autumn
I love the fitfull gusts that shakes
The casement all the day
And from the mossy elm tree takes
The faded leaf away
Twirling it by the window-pane
With thousand others down the lane
I love to see the shaking twig
Dance till the shut of eve
The sparrow on the cottage rig
Whose chirp would make believe
That spring was just now flirting by
In summers lap with flowers to lie
I love to see the cottage smoke
Curl upwards through the naked trees
The pigeons nestled round the coat
On dull November days like these
The cock upon the dung-hill crowing
The mill sails on the heath a-going
The feather from the ravens breast
Falls on the stubble lea
The acorns near the old crows nest
Fall pattering down the tree
The grunting pigs that wait for all
Scramble and hurry where they fall
—John Clare
Pleasant Sounds
The rustling of leaves under the feet in woods and under
hedges;
The crumpling of cat-ice and snow down wood-rides,
narrow lanes and every street causeway;
Rustling through a wood or rather rushing, while the wind
halloos in the oak-toop like thunder;
The rustle of birds’ wings startled from their nests or flying
unseen into the bushes;
The whizzing of larger birds overhead in a wood, such as
crows, puddocks, buzzards;
The trample of robins and woodlarks on the brown leaves.
and the patter of squirrels on the green moss;
The fall of an acorn on the ground, the pattering of nuts on
the hazel branches as they fall from ripeness;
The flirt of the groundlark’s wing from the stubbles –
how sweet such pictures on dewy mornings, when the
dew flashes from its brown feathers.
—John Clare
Sonnet 73 (‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’)
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d by that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
—Mr. William Shakespeare
Plums
When their time comes they fall
without wind, without rain.
They seep through the trees’ muslin
in a slow fermentation.
Daily the low sun warms them
in a late love that is sweeter
than summer. In bed at night
we hear heartbeat of fruitfall.
The secretive slugs crawl home
to the burst honeys, are found
in the morning mouth on mouth,
inseparable.
We spread patchwork counterpanes
for a clean catch. Baskets fill,
never before such harvest,
such a hunters’ moon burning
the hawthorns, drunk on syrups
that are richer by night
when spiders pitch
tents in the wet grass.
This morning the red sun
is opening like a rose
on our white wall, prints there
the fishbone shadow of a fern.
The early blackbirds fly
guilty from a dawn haul
of fallen fruit. We too
breakfast on sweetnesses.
Soon plum trees will be bone,
grown delicate with frost’s
formalities. Their black
angles will tear the snow.
—Gillian Clarke, Former National Poet of Wales
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
—Robert Frost
(Except the sun and honey. Nay, they stay.)
Song of Myself, 6 [A child said, What is the grass?
Walt Whitman
(1819 –1892)
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
—Our own Walt Whitman (1819 –1892) From Leaves of Grass (David McKay, Publisher, 1891)
Here’s another one by moi:
OZARK HARVEST
1.
Lay seed in thumbnail deep
at first spring sunning,
when rays stir in bed
of roots’ long slumber.
Along summer’s green path
gold days scatter–
air decked in light
gray rain and thunder.
Before frost filigrees,
as sun dries dew,
harvest and savor
your share.
Geoffrey Oelsner
2.
Hang herbs leaf-down,
drying in fragrant clumps.
Lug in the fat sweet potato
sacks; torn tomatoes seeping seed.
Shake down ripe jocular apples;
squat and palm wild persimmons
erupting their amber.
Pick those plump blue
muscadine that bubble up on the vine.
Now, bring the garden indoors
to inhale and heal
in your kitchen of Winter Lull.
Geoff Oelsner
Happy Autumn.
PLEASE TOUCH THE EARTH WITH LOVE